]]>Nexmo, a telecom carrier that offers communications services from the cloud, had quite the 2014 as it saw the calls to various APIs double. Like its larger and better-known rival Twilio, Nexmo sells access to voice, SMS and other old-school telco services to developers, which they can embed into their apps and websites with only a few lines of code.

Nexmo, which has raised about $22.8 million in its three-year lifespan, started out as an SMS specialist, and the humble text message remains its core business today. It saw 2.8 billion calls to its communications APIs in 2014, up from 1.4 billion in 2013, but the vast majority of those calls tapped its texting capabilities. For example, it ships SMS confirmations, alerts and booking notices to both Airbnb tenants and landlords.

But it launched its voice API last February so developers could trigger phone calls from their apps as well as provision virtual phone numbers in the cloud. While 97 percent of Nexmo’s revenues came from SMS in 2013, voice now accounts for 15 percent of its revenue, and it’s growing quickly, the company told me (Nexmo isn’t revealing its total revenue numbers, though).

While most of Nexmo’s customers tend to be smaller operations, it has some big fish clients like Airbnb, WeChat, Viber, Expedia, and Chinese internet giant Alibaba. In the last year it’s also signed up cosmetics giant L’Oreal and car-sharing service Zipcar as well as few clients you wouldn’t normally think of as developers: the Centers for Disease Control and the United Nations.

]]>Like many over-the-top communications apps, TextPlus has long been a supplemental messaging and voice tool on its customers’ mobile phones. But over its six-year history, TextPlus (formerly known as Gogii) has seen its customers turn its app into their primary phone, running it over iPod Touches, tablets and plenty of phones that have been disconnected from a carrier network. They’ve essentially turned Wi-Fi into their mobile network.

TextPlus is now taking advantage of that trend by launching a newly revamped Android and iOS app called NextPlus. The update adds new features now common on other messaging apps. Most significantly, the app is redesigned around the virtual phone number, letting textPlus users more easily send SMS and MMS messages and call users outside of TextPlus’s 70 million–user network (the texting features are available now, while calling will come online in the next few weeks).

Image: TextPlus

According to Austin Murray, co-founder and president, NextPlus is basically the app many of the company’s users wanted when they first downloaded its software — a mobile phone with no mobile carrier. Calls and texts to any U.S. or Canadian number are free, while TextPlus charges discount rates for international calls and messages.

TextPlus on Wednesday also announced a deal with U.K. mobile carrier Three to use its phone numbers for its virtual phone network. That means NextPlus now will be able to assign local numbers in three countries: the U.S., Canada and the U.K. TextPlus has other deals in the works with international carriers, and as those deals stack up, TextPlus could wind up offering something like an international roaming service, Murray said.

Imagine stepping off the plane at Heathrow Airport, connecting to an airport hotspot, and firing up your NextPlus app, which would then assign you a +44 U.K. number on the fly. Without buying a SIM card or signing up for a prepaid plan, you could be making and receiving local calls in minutes. Technically you could do that today if you were signing up for NextPlus for the first time overseas, Murray said, but the company doesn’t yet offer multiple international numbers to a single account. That could easily change in the future, he added.

]]>AT&T and Verizon have just started rolling out voice over LTE (VoLTE), but they already have plans to link their two next-generation voice services together. The pair announced plans on Monday to begin interoperability work on VoLTE. Sometime in 2015 an AT&T customers might just be able to make a VoLTE call to a Verizon customer — and vice versa — and see that conversation stay entirely on IP networks.

Why is that a big deal? Well, for the consumer, the most noticeable initial benefit will be higher-quality HD voice calls. A lot of carriers are already offering HD voice, but it’s surprisingly difficult to actually make a high-definition call. Not only do both you and the person you’re calling need to own HD-capable VoLTE handsets like the iPhone 6, you need to be connected to an HD-enabled cell site. And in nearly all cases today, you also have to be on the same carrier. Interoperability won’t solve all of those problems, but at least it means every call you make to a friend on a different network won’t automatically be downgraded to plain old circuit-switched voice conversation.

The really big advantages, however, will come when carriers start layering chat, presence notifications, file transfers and even video over these new VoLTE frameworks. Verizon, for instance, launched VoLTE in September with a FaceTime-like video chat capability that will work between any of its VoLTE handsets. That’s great if everyone you know happens to be a Verizon customer and has a new VoLTE-capable handset, but until we get interoperability those services will be trapped with their carrier’s individual networks.

You can think of VoLTE as SMS at the beginning of the millennium. All 2G phones had the ability to send and receive text messages, but because every carrier was using its own proprietary technology, there was no guarantee that any message to sent to another carrier’s network would ever be received (imagine if Gmail users could only send email to other Gmail users). When the U.S. mobile industry finally got its act together and standardized SMS, we finally saw the explosion in text messaging already witnessed in other parts of the world.

VoLTE will follow a similar path. What we’re seeing today are in essence proprietary communications services similar to over-the-top communication apps like Skype, Tango and FaceTime. But as carriers work together and plug into standards like the GSM Association’s Rich Communications Suite, we’ll see the applications become more universally interoperable and ultimately more useful to the average smartphone owner.

That means we’re going to need more than just AT&T and Verizon fiddling around the interoperability lab to make this whole VoLTE thing work. Verizon CTO Tony Melone said that while AT&T and Verizon are playing a duet for these initial trials, Verizon looks “forward to working with other operators as VoLTE continues to grow.”

]]>Twilio is adding a twist to its MMS service, which lets developers embed picture, video and other multimedia messaging into their apps. It’s now adding MMS support for regular 10-digit phone numbers, wherever that number happens to terminate. That means companies can now use a single phone number for all of their customer communications, whether its voice calls, text messaging or multimedia messaging.

The capability isn’t entirely new. Companies like Zipwhip and Bandwidth already offer SMS-and MMS-to-landline services to their business and telecom customers and carrier like Frontier Communications have already starting offering offering it to local businesses. But this could be a very powerful tool for Twilio’s core developer customers because it lets them set up visual two-way communications with their customers, said Jeff Lawson, CEO and founder of Twilio.

A phone number the most direct way companies communicate with your customers, Lawson said. If you can call that number, it makes sense that you should be able to receive text or multimedia messages from that same number as well. Twilio doesn’t yet offer MMS support for toll-free numbers, though it does offer SMS over 1-800 numbers.

Today many companies use short codes to communicate with their customers via SMS and MMS. Not only is a expensive to provision a short code, it just shows up as a random number in your messaging client, Lawson said. If 1-999-DOG-WALK is how you communicate with your canine-owning clients, then it should be the number they can text to reach you and the number from which they receive photo updates of their pooches.

Nordstrom is using Twilio MMS on the back end to power what amounts to a customer relations management system for its network of personal shoppers. A personal shopper can snap photos of new items a client might like and send them to that client through Nordstrom’s app. The client just sees an MMS and personal message appear on their phone coming from his or her personal shopper’s number. The personal shopper, however, sees an app or website that manages the recommendations and communications with dozens of individuals clients.

But Lawson said MMS could become a key behind-the-scenes technology in the internet of things. Twilio is already working with hardware developers to embed its communications technology into gadgets. For instance an automaker – which Lawson said he couldn’t name – is using its SMS services to “wake up” telematics systems of cars when they’re parked and offline so they can record a location or take a sensor reading.

SMS, however, can only send basic information: “on” or “off” commands, or whatever status updates you can pack into 160 ASCI characters. MMS was designed for multimedia communications between people, but those multimedia files can be used to carry a lot more data. A sensor for instance could compile a week’s worth of data and embed it into a JPEG file. A device could send data in the form of QR code, video or even a audio WAV file.

More developers are starting to tap Twilio’s SMS and MMS APIs for machine-to-machine communications because SMS is cheap, simple to implement and it’s both reliable and ubiquitous, Lawson said. You might think of Twilio is a new-economy company providing old-school communications services, but according to Lawson, Twilio is evolving into a communications platform for the internet of things.

This post was updated at 10:45 AM PT to clarify the statement that Twilio MMS can send messages to a landline. While Twilio can send MMS from any regular number, that number technically terminates on a virtual extension, not a traditional wireline phone. Also Twilio isn’t yet offering MMS support on toll-free numbers.

As we purchase new smartphones over the next few years, we’ll find traditional 2G phone calls receding into the past and voice or SMS becoming just another IP service. Today, however, consumers buying new VoLTE phones probably won’t notice much of a difference.

These initial VoLTE rollouts are focused solely on voice, which makes sense given the technology’s name, but apart from making the occasional HD voice call to other VoLTE device owners, the service is going to look – and cost – the same as old-school voice calls.

The real promise of VoLTE isn’t voice, but rather the raft of IP services that can be attached to those voice calls. By moving to an all IP network and service delivery platform, voice just becomes another feature in a wide-ranging communication service, all of which can be linked to a universal ID: your ten-digit phone number.

VoLTE could make video chat features like Apple’s Facetime standard on all 4G phones (source: Apple)

Verizon has already gotten wise to potential of VoLTE for more than just voice. It recently announced that it would launch its new VoIP service nationwide late this year with a video-chat service similar to Apple’s Facetime. But video chat is just the beginning. SMS will become augmented with presence and IM features now common in over-the-top messaging apps. Collaboration and sharing features could be layered on top of any voice or video chat session. Basically all of the new communications features that help make smartphones “smart” will no longer be walled off from the phone’s core voice and texting services.

What’s more, the strict association of a phone number with a particular phone begins to blur. VoLTE will help virtualize our phone numbers, allowing calls to be routed to your web browser when at your desk and switch back to your smartphone when you leave the room.

A single phone could host multiple identities and multiple phone numbers. So for instance, during business hours your phone’s business persona would be active and all calls and messages sent to your “office line” would get prioritized. But as the clock hits 5 PM, that business persona would recede into the background, routing all calls to voicemail and storing all messages for later viewing. At the same time your personal account resurfaces, bringing communications with your friends and family to the forefront.

Most of the capabilities probably already sound familiar to you because they’ve long been available from a bevy of different over-the-top communications apps, ranging from Facetime and Tango to WhatsApp and Google Voice.

The big difference – and perhaps the carriers’ only advantage after being so late to the market – is that VoLTE can centralize all these services in a single client and apply them universally across all phones. OTT apps not only require registration, but their networks are inherently limited by their membership. Every mobile phone owner has a phone number, and even if every device doesn’t support more advanced VoLTE features, any communications session can always default to a phone call or SMS exchange.

But because these kind of communications capabilities have been available for so long — and often for free — in the app stores, the carriers will have a difficult time charging for them. After years of getting free video chat with Skype, Facetime and Tango, there’s no way Verizon can suddenly come out with a $5 video-calling plan.

I recently interviewed the CTO of enterprise communications company Broadsoft, Scott Hoffpauir. He believes that carriers aren’t really building these VoLTE networks for consumers. Rather they’re building them for enterprises, which are much more likely to pay for the advanced collaboration, security and identity services VoLTE will bring.

That calculus makes sense, but I also think we’ll see VoLTE’s best features become readily available to consumers as well. Carriers won’t turn those video chat and IM features into new revenue streams. Instead they’ll use them to preserve the voice revenues they already have. Basically VoLTE will help prevent the carriers’ voice and SMS services from becoming irrelevant.

]]>FreedomPop’s freemium mobile voice and data services are available in mobile hotspots, home modems and smartphones, but until today there was one 4G device it hadn’t yet tackled: the tablet. On Wednesday, though, it will begin selling iPad minis and the Samsung Tab 3, both of which will come with its standard 500-MB, 500-SMS and 200-minute monthly plan at no cost.

The devices are refurbished Sprint tablets that will connect to that carrier’s LTE and CDMA networks. As a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), FreedomPop buys wholesale data from Sprint on which it builds its communications services. It gives users a small monthly pool of data, VoIP an IP SMS a to use or share with friends and then upsells its customers on additional usage and other features like VPN access, data compression and boosted network speeds.

The Samsung Tab 3, along with the iPad mini, will be the first two tablets FreedomPop will sell.

The move to tablets, though, is an interesting twist on its business model. You don’t necessarily need a mobile broadband connection to productively use a tablet as the millions of people who buy Wi-Fi-only slates demonstrate on daily basis. According to CEO Stephen Stokols, FreedomPop is trying to make the idea of the 4G tablet more palatable by giving away baseline mobile connectivity for free and throwing in a phone number to boot.

The first-generation iPad mini will sell for $319 and the Tab 3 for $199 on the MVNO’s website. FreedomPop will also connect other LTE-capable Sprint tablets for customers who bring their own device, Stokols said.

FreedomPop’s offer is particularly compelling, though, because you can buy a discounted slate without a paying a dime in service fees as long as you stay below its 500 MB monthly threshold. And if you ever wanted to cancel your service with FreedomPop the you still have perfectly functioning tablet you can use over Wi-Fi.

]]>A big battle is brewing in the Caribbean between mobile carriers and over-the-top communications services. Multi-national operator Digicel has condemned VoIP applications like Viber, Facetime and Tango as “parasitic” and has taken steps to block those apps’ traffic in several countries, including Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Suriname.

Other operators, like Jamaica’s Lime, have joined Digicel in the VoIP blockade, but it looks as if OTT apps are wending their way through the lines. Viber CEO Talmon Marco told the Jamaica Gleaner it has restored service to its customers in the Caribbean despite the carriers’ obstacles, and that Viber could overcome future technical barriers thrown in its way.

Ironically, the kerfuffle has only brought more users and more traffic to Viber’s OTT app. Digicel certainly isn’t the first carrier that’s tried to ban or restrict VoIP traffic from its network. TeliaSonera weighed charging customers additional fees for using VoIP services like Skype, but it eventually backed down, electing to raise its data plan pricing instead.

We’re going to see this kind of battle waged more throughout the world as carriers find their traditional voice and SMS revenue threatened. U.S. operators have tried to the head off the conflict, simply by making unlimited voice and SMS a standard feature on most of their phone plans. It’s hardly the most progressive policy, though. AT&T and Verizon may have no problem with you using VoIP, but they’re going to charge you for traditional voice services anyway.

As anyone with a smartphone knows, LTE and 3G data coverage can be fickle, causing your phone to flip flop between multi-megabit speeds and the most constricted of connections as you move through the network. VoIP is particularly sensitive to those big peaks and dips in connection quality.

But by adding Wi-Fi to the mix, phones can select the best wireless network available in any given location, and hand-over between the cellular and Wi-Fi means the phone can move a call to the optimal network mid-conversation.

To be honest, TextNow all-IP service isn’t nearly as reliable as a traditional mobile voice plan. When I tested out the service last year, I had a fairly good experience even when making calls over Sprint’s 3G data network. But there was a long delay in setting up calls, and I was testing under optimal conditions: stationary on my home Wi-Fi network or in a dense city network where Sprint’s data networks are most powerful.

But TextNow also doesn’t charge traditional mobile carrier prices. Its baseline plan costs $19 a month and includes 500 MB of data, 750 outgoing minutes and unlimited text messages and incoming calls. According to Enflick CEO Derek Ting, TextNow isn’t designed to replace the traditional Verizon or AT&T voice and data plan. Rather, it’s targeted at a youth market that wants a basic voice service to complement its usual SMS-heavy communications habits.

]]>Despite the phenomenal rise of the smartphone in recent years, there is still a significant minority of mobile phone users who could care less or can’t afford data access. They just want to use their phones to make calls or send text messages, and starting Saturday Virgin Mobile is going after that group with new $20 PayLo monthly plans available exclusively at Walmart.

Cheap talk and text plans from a prepaid operator are nothing new, but Sprint-owned Virgin Mobile USA is focusing on the hard-core users on either side of the voice and messaging divide. For $20 a month you can either get an unlimited SMS plan (with 50 minutes of voice) or unlimited voice (with 50 text messages).

The Samsung Montage (source: Samsung)

These plans are available on two feature phones, the Samsung Montage and the very basic Kyocera Kona. Both devices sport limited internet features, but I wouldn’t recommend opening your mobile browser. On these plans, mobile data costs a whopping $1.50 per megabyte. If you thought the industry average of $15 a gigabyte was high, these rates work out to be about $1,500 per 1 GB.

As you might imagine, these two variants target entirely separate demographics. The older generation isn’t still fully comfortable with SMS, making the big bucket text message plans included in most plans these days pretty useless. Meanwhile the younger generation often can’t be bother with making a phone call when a text message (or 25) will do.

]]>One of the nuggets to come out of Apple’s iOS 8 launch was the iPhone’s upcoming support for Wi-Fi calling. It’s a feature that not only will let consumers take advantage of carriers’ voice-over-Wi-Fi service, but is also the first step toward voice over LTE (VoLTE), which will put all mobile communications on IP networks.

The feature showed up as a mere bullet point in a long list of iOS 8’s new capabilities shown on screen at WWDC 2014, but T-Mobile immediately jumped, announcing it would bring its voice-over-Wi-Fi service to the iPhone when the new operating system becomes publicly available this fall. We’ll probably see a similar announcement shortly from Sprint and other global carriers offering Wi-Fi calling.

While there are plenty of apps that will let you make phone calls over the iPhone’s data connection, it’s been very difficult to make those services work with the iPhone’s main dialer. That’s why T-Mobile has been integrating Wi-Fi calling directly into its Android and Windows phones for years, but on iOS it has been forced to go over-the-top. For a while T-Mobile offered a separate VoIP calling app for iOS called Bobsled.

Image: Shutterstock / Sputanski

Over the years carrier Wi-Fi calling services have shrunk in importance since most voice plans have moved over to unlimited buckets, though for people living or working in a dodgy coverage zone or international travelers, those calling features are still a godsend. But VoLTE is a just a hop away and it could have a much more substantial impact on consumers and business users.

A host of other features like presence, instant messaging and integration with enterprise phone networks are other possibilities. While you get many of those services through third-party apps, VoLTE would integrate them directly into the dialer and attach them to your phone number.

I reached out to Apple about whether VoLTE support would be available on iOS but haven’t heard back yet. In its most basic form, VoLTE isn’t much different than Voice over Wi-Fi. It’s another IP connection, though carriers will be able prioritize voice and video calling traffic over their own 4G networks.